General Overview

Farming on the Gamekeeper servers is relatively easy. There are multiple plugins that makes your life a lot easier when it comes to farming ore such as Sulfur, Metal and Stone, as well as an overall increased gather rate. In this post, we will cover the plugins available to you, how to utilise them to their best capability for farming ore, as well as how to farm mass amounts of ore in a small amount of time and how to farm efficiently. This topic is a much needed topic, so you’re able to gain a better understanding of how you can use certain aspects of our plugin selection to your advantage. We will utilise headings and bullet points throughout this post to make it easier for you to find what you need or to make your reading experience that little bit easier.

We would like to include a special thank you to Rust Labs for providing all necessary data around vanilla gather rates for this post and the images used above.

Manual Farming (No specific farm plugin talk)

• The most effective way to manual farm in Rust is by using the Jackhammer, this can be obtained via VIP kits using /kit, Outpost for 150 Scrap, a 2% dig rate by using a Metal Detector in a Forest or via Toolboxes on Junk Piles.
• You should use Ore Tea’s, these come in the forms of Basic Ore Tea (+20% Ore Yield for 30 minutes), Advanced Ore Tea (+35% Ore Yield for 30 minutes) or Pure Ore Tea (+50% Ore Yield for 30 minutes). As you can see by the stats, this can significantly boost your Ore Yield and will make manual farming more efficient. You can obtain Ore Tea’s by either using a Mixing Table or by purchasing them using the RP store by typing /s.
• Other tools for farming such as a Salvaged Icepick and a Pickaxe hold the same resource yield as a Jackhammer, however take a lot more time to completely destroy a node.
• Whilst farming Ore Nodes, on the ground you will see Scattered Ore. Although the Scattered Ore does not provide a large yield, it can never hurt to pick these up.
• Sulfur Ore is considered the rarer resource, however you can normally find an abundance of it in Snow or Desert biomes.
• When you locate an area you believe is good for farming ore, you should place down a farming base or a teleport location (using /home add) so you can revisit the location every now and then once the Ore Nodes have respawned.
• Get yourself a Minicopter from Bandit Camp for 750 Scrap or by using the command /mymini. This means you’re not spending a lot of time running around trying to find Ore Nodes and allows you to get from point A to point B a lot faster. Alternatively, you can utilise a horse but this may be more difficult for hopping between islands or climbing hills/mountains.

Static Quarries

• Static Quarries are not an plugin exclusive, you can find these on most vanilla servers and modded servers.
• Any Static Quarry requires Diesel Fuel to operate, Diesel Fuel can be found at most monuments, purchased from Outpost for Low Grade Fuel or bought with RP using the /s command.
• Static Quarries takes the manual labour out of farming, all you need to do is give it some fuel and boom, you’re passively generating Ore.
• We would always recommend utilising Static Quarries, the output rate from a Static Quarry is quite significant compared to manually farming depending on the situation.
• On GameKeeper, the Static Quarry inventory is only viewable by YOU. This means that there is zero risk of your Ore and Diesel Fuel being stolen.
• Although Static Quarry inventories are only viewable by YOU, they can still be utilised by everyone. If you visit one, you will notice it’s running this is intended but don’t worry it doesn’t mean someone is using it as you will not be able to tell.

Giant Excavator

• You may or may not notice this from almost every other server on Rust, Giant Excavator (Excavator for short).
• Excavator is another method of automatically farming Ore, however, at higher Ore yield than the Static Quarries.
• The Excavator, just like Static Quarries takes Diesel Fuel but it does take less time to gather more Ore. Each Diesel Fuel takes two minutes to be used.
• Operating Excavator, unlike Static Quarries and Virtual Quarries (covered below) comes with greater risks. This monument is guarded and patrolled by Excavator Scientist’s, sends out a server wide message stating that someone is using Excavator when activated and your Ore can be looted from the Ore deposit spots, so when running this you’ll either need to keep a sharp eye on everything or be prepared to defend your loot.
• It’s best to figure out if it’s worth using Excavator before fully committing to this monument, because just like the saying, greater risk, greater reward.
• If you are not running Excavator but someone else on the server is, we would suggest considering trying to steal the Ore from the player running this via the Ore deposit spots. However, once again it’s best to figure out for yourself if it’s worth doing this.

Let’s talk about ZLevels

• ZLevels has four categories as seen in the image. Acquire (picking up plants, Scattered Rock, Scattered Wood etc), Mining (Mining Ore Nodes), Skinning (Skinning an animal, NPC or player) and Woodcutting (Cutting/Chopping Trees).
• This is one of two plugins that are utilised on GameKeeper that give you a massive boost in quality of life when farming manually. 
• Each ZLevels category can be levelled up by following the requirements of that category. However, with each level the requirements increase therefore when you’re a higher level it will take longer to reach the next level.
• When you level up a category, you will get a higher output rate of whatever you’ve levelled up. For example, the image above is level 21 in Mining, this would give you a higher Ore yield when mining compared to people below this level.
• We would definitely recommend increasing whatever category is suitable for you as much as possible. This way, you’re able to increase your yield substantially and make farming more efficient. Combine a high level with the increased gather rate (5x or 10x depending on server) you are able to get a lot of farm in a short amount of time.

Virtual Quarries, Your Own Personal, Zero Risk Quarry at home

• Virtual Quarries is an amazing plugin that was recently added to GameKeeper, allowing you to have your own personal Quarries, where ever you are to automate farming Ore even more!
• You can access the Virtual Quarries interface by using the command /qr – this will open the interface found in the above image.
• When you access the Virtual Quarries interface, you can see the limit that is set on the right under “Quarry Info” for how many Mining Quarries, Mining Pumpjack’s and Oil Refineries you can place.
• To place a Virtual Quarry you will either need a Mining Pumpjack, Mining Quarry or an Oil Refinery (these will be referred to as a deployable). These can be obtained in monuments, event locked crates or by purchasing them with RP using /s.
• Along with the above, you will also need Survey Charge’s. These will allow you after pressing the plus icon (+) to search for Ore, Crude Oil & Low Grade or Diesel Fuel depending on what item you have to place from the above.
• When searching for any of the three in the above point, don’t worry, you don’t need to constantly move location! Each Survey Charge used will bring back different results. It’s just a luck of the draw thing.
• We would highly recommend making a few hundred Survey Charge’s to find the most optimal output of each material, never settle for the first result because the next one could always be better. Don’t be afraid to settle for the first one though, as if you find something that’s better you can just cancel your search once you’ve found a better output, press on the deployable that you place and you will see a trash can icon. You can click on this to remove your deployable, press the plus icon (+) and the re-place it with a better output rate.
• Virtual Quarries can be upgraded to level 9. This can be done using the required resources or RP shown in the upgrade menu once you’ve press on your quarry. Remember though, each level you upgrade to will cost more resources or RP.
• The best way to utilise Virtual Quarries is to put a bit of Diesel Fuel into a Mining Pumpjack, then transfer the Crude Oil from the Pumpjack into an Oil Refinery. Once the Oil Refinery has depleted its fuel, you will be left with more Diesel Fuel than you began with. You can then start distributing this as you please, but always make sure you have that cycle of Pumpjack and then Oil Refinery going.
• Once you start generating an excess amount of Diesel Fuel from your Virtual Quarry, you should the utilise this in the Static Quarries (mentioned above). This way, you’re constantly automatically generating Ore and enough fuel to keep your automatic Ore production going.

Skill Tree, Your Best Friend

• Just as I put in the Heading, Skill Tree will become your best friend on our servers. Not only is it extremely useful, it’s an essential when farming.
• Skill Tree has multiple different skill tree’s you can add your Skill Tree points into, these include but are not limited to; Mining, Wood Cutting, Harvesting, Raiding and Combat.
• You can access the Skill Tree interface by using the command /st.
• To get Skill Tree Points, you can do multiple things to gain XP such as farming, killing NPC’s, looting crates etc. Once you have enough XP (XP bar is displayed on the bottom right by default), you will gain two Skill Tree Points. These can then be spend on your desired category.
• Each category includes multiple different skills you can increase by spending Skill Tree Points, keep in mind not every skill is available immediately, you will need the lower tier skills before you can get skills of a higher tier.
• If you are able to gain fifteen (15) Skill Tree Points, it’s best to spend all of these on the Mining Yield skill. Each tier of this skill will increase your mining yield by a certain %. If you combine this with ZLevels (Mining), a Pure Ore Tea and a Jackhammer your mining yield could be through the roof! Generally, if you’re in a good spot for Ore Node spawning you will easily get over 1,000,000 Ore in less than 15 minutes.
• Once you get enough Skill Tree Points, you can unlock your “Ultimate”. For Mining, this allows you to locate nodes within a 200m radius making finding nodes even easier and quicker.

Summary

As you can see from all of the points above, we have made gathering Ore and resources a lot more efficient, convenient and quicker for players. Realistically, if you put a little bit of time in to both manual and automatic farming, you can start generating millions of Ore in the blink of an eye. Always take into consideration risk factors when manually mining or using Excavator, however if you stick at it you could eventually brag about being the richest person on the server or the person with the most boom if that takes your fancy.